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The number of people using Microsoft Office around the world is staggering, bringing in $143 billion in revenue for Microsoft every year. The vast majority of users never click the font menu to change the style to one of more than 700 options. Therefore, this means that a large part of the population spends time on Calibri, which is the default font for Office since 2007.
Today, Microsoft is moving forward. The company commissioned five new fonts by five different font designers to replace Calibri. They can now be used in Office. By the end of 2022, Microsoft will select one of them as the new default option.
Calibri [Image: Microsoft] “We can give it a try, let people look at them, use them, and give us feedback on the way forward,” said Si Daniels, chief project manager for Microsoft Office Design. “We don’t think Calibri has an expiration date, but there is no font that can be used forever.”
When Calibri made its debut 14 years ago, our screen ran at a lower resolution. This is the time before Retina Displays and 4K Netflix streaming. This means that making lowercase letters clearly visible on the screen is tricky.
Microsoft has been solving this problem for a long time, and it has developed a system called ClearType to help solve it. ClearType debuted in 1998, and after years of improvement, it has obtained 24 patents.
ClearType is a highly professional software designed to make fonts clearer by using the software alone (because there is not even a higher resolution screen yet). To this end, it deployed various techniques, such as adjusting the individual red, green, and blue elements within each pixel to make the letters clearer, and applying a special anti-aliasing function (this technique can smooth out the jaggedness in computer graphics). the edge of). Basically, ClearType allows the font to be modified to make it look clearer than it actually is.
Calibri [Image: Microsoft] In this sense, ClearType is more than just a neat visual technique. It has had a substantial impact on users, increasing people’s reading speed by 5% in Microsoft’s own research.
Calibri is a font specially commissioned by Microsoft to take full advantage of ClearType’s features, which means that its glyphs are built from scratch and can be used with the system. Calibri is a sans serif font, which means that it is a modern font, such as Helvetica, without hooks and edges at the end of the letter. Sans serifs are generally considered content-independent, like the bread of visual wonders that your brain can forget, it focuses only on the information in the text. For Office (with many different use cases), Wonder Bread is exactly what Microsoft wants.
Calibri is a good font. I’m not talking about being a print critic, but an objective observer: Calibri has done the heaviest action on all fonts in human history, and I certainly haven’t heard anyone complain. When I am afraid to open Excel, it is not because of the default font. This is because it is tax season.
Daniels said: “The screen resolution has increased to an unnecessary level.” “Therefore, Calibri is designed for rendering technology that is no longer in use. Since then, font technology has been evolving.”
Another problem is that, in Microsoft’s view, Calibri’s taste for Microsoft is not neutral enough.
“It looks great on a small screen,” Daniels said. “Once you enlarge it, (see) the end of the character font becomes rounded, which is strange.”
Ironically, Luc de Groot, the designer of Calibri, initially suggested to Microsoft that his fonts should not have rounded corners because he believed that ClearType could not render fine curved details correctly. But Microsoft told de Groot to keep them because ClearType just developed a new technology to render them properly.
In any case, Daniels and his team commissioned five studios to produce five new sans serif fonts, each designed to replace Calibri: Tenorite (written by Erin McLaughlin and Wei Huang), Bierstadt (written by Steve Matteson) ), Skeena (written by John Hudson and Paul Hanslow), Seaford (Tobias Frere-Jones, Nina Stössinger and Fred Shallcrass) and Jun Yi (Aaron Bell) Salute.
At first glance, I’ll be honest: to most people, these fonts look the same to a large extent. They are all smooth sans serif fonts, just like Calibri.
“A lot of customers, they don’t even think about fonts or look at fonts at all. Only when they zoom in, they will see different things!” Daniels said. “Really, about, once you use them, do they feel natural? Are some weird characters blocking them? Do these numbers feel correct and readable? I think we are extending the acceptable range to the limit. But they do There are similarities.”
If you study fonts more closely, you will find differences. Tenorite, Bierstadt and Grandview in particular are the birthplaces of traditional modernism. This means that the letters have relatively strict geometric shapes, and the purpose is to make them as indistinguishable as possible. The circles of Os and Qs are the same, and the cycles in Rs and Ps are the same. The goal of these fonts is to build on a perfect, reproducible design system. In this respect, they are beautiful.
On the other hand, Skeena and Seaford have more roles. Skeena plays line thickness to include asymmetry in letters such as X. Seaford quietly rejected the strictest modernism, adding a taper to many glyphs. This means that each letter looks a little different. The weirdest character is Skeena’s k, which has an R’s up loop.
As Tobias Frere-Jones explained, his goal is not to make a completely anonymous font. He believes that the challenge begins with the impossible. “We spent a lot of time discussing what the default value is or may be, and in many environments for a long period of time, the default Helvetica and other sans serifs or things close to the default value are described by the idea that Helvetica is neutral. It’s colorless,” said Frere-Jones. “We don’t believe there is such a thing.”
Do not. For Jones, even the sleek modernist font has its own meaning. Therefore, for Seaford, Frere-Jones admitted that his team “abandoned the goal of making neutral or colorless objects.” Instead, he said that they chose to do something “comfortable” and this term became the basis of the project. .
Seaford [Image: Microsoft] Comfortable is a font that is easy to read and does not press tightly on the page. This led his team to create letters that feel different from each other to make them easier to read and easier to recognize. Traditionally, Helvetica is a popular font, but it is designed for large logos, not for longer texts. Frere-Jones said that Calibri is better at a smaller size and can compress many letters onto one page, but for long-term reading, it’s never a good thing.
Therefore, they created Seaford to feel like Calibri and not too concerned about letter density. In the digital age, printing pages are rarely restricted. Therefore, Seaford stretched out every letter to pay more attention to the comfort of reading.
“Think of it not as a “default”, but more like a chef’s recommendation of the good dishes on this menu,” Frere-Jones said. “As we read more and more on the screen, I think the comfort level will become more urgent.”
Of course, although Frere-Jones gave me a convincing sales opportunity, the vast majority of Office users will never hear the logic behind him or other competing fonts. They can simply select the font from the drop-down menu in the Office application (it should have been automatically downloaded to Office when reading this article). Microsoft collects minimal data on font usage. The company knows how often users choose fonts, but does not know how they are actually deployed in documents and spreadsheets. Therefore, Microsoft will solicit user opinions in social media and public opinion surveys.
“We want customers to give us feedback and let us know what they like,” Daniels said. This feedback will not only inform Microsoft about its final decision on its next default font; the company is happy to make adjustments to these new fonts before the final decision to please its audience. For all the efforts of the project, Microsoft is not in a hurry, which is why we do not want to hear more before the end of 2022.
Daniels said: “We will study adjusting the numbers so that they work well in Excel, and provide PowerPoint with a [large] display font.” “The font will then become a fully baked font and it will be used with Calibri For a while, so we are completely confident before flipping the default font.”
However, no matter what Microsoft ultimately chooses, the good news is that all new fonts will still remain in Office along with Office Calibri. When Microsoft chooses a new default value, the choice cannot be avoided.
Mark Wilson is a senior writer for “Fast Company”. He has been writing about design, technology and culture for nearly 15 years. His work has appeared in Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach.
Post time: Apr-29-2021